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Home Media – Part 2 – The Setup

unRAID boots from a USB flash drive, and the flash drive needs to have a GUID or Globally Unique Identifier. This is for the purposes of licensing. If you do end up loosing or something happens to the flash drive generally lime-tech is pretty good about it and all you need to do is email them, they might ask for a new GUID and send you a new key. Here is their policy on that. I’ve had two flash drives fail on my and they were pretty good about giving me a replacement key. Once unRAID boots from the flash drive it mostly runs in memory, and since it’s a stripped version of Slackware Linux it doesn’t really require a lot of memory to run.

First, grab a 4GB flash drive, for best results grab a flash drive from the Hardware Compatibility page. The key here is that your flash drive needs to have a GUID, some have it and some don’t. Speed is also a factor, as in read and write speed. Alternatively if you want to know if your drive is compatible and has a GUID grab any flash drive and quick format it to FAT32, use Volume Label: UNRAID, then unzip the contents of the ZIP file found here to said drive, and boot it on any networked machine. If you’re having trouble booting follow the drive preparation instructions. Once booted log into unRAID, username:root, password:<blank>. Type in ifconfig to obtain the IP address, then head over to another networked machine and type that IP into a browser, this should take you to the main unRAID page.Here is the getting started page from Lime-Technology which describes the same thing in greater detail. Alternatively by default you can access the unRAID web GUI by typing in http://tower instead of http://<unRAID IP address>.

There is also something called the GO file which is located in the /config folder on the root of the flash drive. The go file gets executed at boot and in here you can put any special instructions or drive maps that you’d like to execute at boot. In my case I mount a drive that is outside of the array, I call it the system drive and it holds all the configurations for my docker containers. This is not necessary as the same can be accomplished with the cache drive. Here’s what my go file looks like.

#Install Screen and Utemper, utemper is necessary for screen to work
installpkg /boot/packages/screen-4.0.3-x86_64-4.txz
installpkg /boot/packages/utempter-1.1.5-x86_64-1.txz

The free version of unRAID (uR) allows you to use 3 drives. The Hardware compatibility list also provides some standards and minimum requirements for the server hardware, usually an old desktop will do. If you decide to go with a 8 or 25 disk server, you will need to pickup a decent RAID card and a good enclosure.

There is also something called the GO file which is located in the /config folder on the root of the flash drive. The go file gets executed at boot and in here you can put any special instructions or drive maps that you’d like to execute at boot. In my case I mount a drive that is outside of the array, I call it the system drive and it holds all the configurations for my docker containers. This is not necessary as you can to the same for the cache drive.

Plugins vs Docker. In unRAID, plugins were the go to in version 5 and prior, this was the way to install applications on your NAS. They were easy to install and worked well, until you installed a new plugin which had, let’s say a newer version of Python in it. If this happened it would break all the plugins which relied on the previous version of Python. I ran into this issue multiple times in both version 5 and 4 of unRAID. There was no standard and people wrote plugins they way it suited them. At one point in version 5 I had to go into a the plugin and change the python version it pulled and installed, this broke a minor function of the plugin but made it sort of work. There was also an issue I had with sql lite, a plugin was pulling a newer version than was supported by another application, and finally some plugins would break the web interface. When version 6 of unRAID entered beta and docker was a possibility I jumped for joy. Yes by nature the docker equivalent is larger, however since these are self contained application on top of a OS layer, there is no chance that one application would break another. Also now with docker one could have multiple versions of python ans whatever the prerequisite for an application was. The only problem with docker is that it is not as easy to implement as the plugins. It takes a little know how to get it up and running. But, since I moved everything to docker I have less downtime on my server, and I’m not as often remoting into the server to administer it. That’s a win in my books.

Most applications that you would want on your NAS more than likely already have a docker container created for them. However if you want to create your own and if you’re curious about docker in general here is a great Docker 101 tutorial video by Ken Cochrane.

I’m not going to tell you how to setup docker in unRaid or how to put together your server hardware, but what I will do is point you to some really cool articles/blogs that describe how to do so. In my opinion there is no point in reinventing the wheel.

Update: In the final version 6 of UnRAID docker container manager is included and installing docker containers is as easy as point and click for the most part. Good place to get the containers is from http://linuxserver.io

Over at the Corsair Blog there is a really cool How to Build a PC section. I hope http://www.corsair.com doesn’t mind me linking to their site. It’s intended on teaching you how plan and build an gaming PC, but there are still articles relevant to building and putting together computer hardware regardless of what the desired purpose is. If you click the link make sure you sort by Date (Older – Newer), this way you will start on the first post and you can continue on in a logical order.

The Lime-technology website has a really good tutorial on how to get docker up and running on your server. Check out their Docker Guide over at http://lime-technology.com/ . Again I hope they don’t mind that I link to their content as this is a very well written and comprehensive docker guide.

About Nerd Drivel

Knowledge is power. Empower yourself!
I've been a computer nerd since I was 7 years old. I started in the days of the Power PC with a Commodore 64. As I grew so did my knowledge and curiosity, anything I could take apart with a screw driver would be opened and investigated.
Later on I went on to graduate from a post secondary Computer Engineering program.
Today I work in an IT department for a mid sized company, I get to tinker and toy with gadgets of all types, fuelling my passion for technology and software.
I understand computers more than I understand some people.